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Yep, unless you mean going out and asking every individual user which OSes and drivers they are running. The only reliable way to do that is with a mandatory reporting mechanism that sends user information back to AMD for all OSes, which would be extremely unpopular.

Voluntary reporting is not particularly useful since you have no way to determine whether the group that *did* respond is representative of the entire user base, or whether they have "self-selected" based on particular interests or preferences.

Please, please, Mr. Bridgeman, please give people the possibility to inform the HQ what code is parsed by your cards that they purchase. Please!
Every card has a SN, this SN alone + small booklet or even mention on AMD/ATI website is absolutely enough! After purchasing hardware people will logon there and put their card in database, they only need a SN and driver type, nothing more. No one buys cards everyday, it would be so much helpful! And PPd compressed DB does not waste any hw resources past 30$ harddrive, nor it exposes private information.

Your money is going into lawyers who are clearing hardware documentation for release. And your money is going into developers who are writing driver code. Say AMD spends 0.1% of their budget on open source Linux drivers. That 0.1% is going to grow in absolute terms when AMD earns more money. They probably don't know how exactly how many customers are using their cards with an open driver, but they must have estimates.

We are neither claiming to nor attempting to provide enough development resources to fully implement the open source drivers ourselves. That was not the plan in the past, is not the plan today, and I don't expect it to be the plan in the future.

We *are*, however, trying to make sure that we get enough information, support and sample code out to the driver development community to let the community make good use of the hardware (other than specific blocks like UVD, which we said up front would probably not be exposed), and I believe we are doing that today.

So, AMD provides documentation. No interest in selling cards for linux use.They are providing documentation and initial support, so linux people have fun hacking... Erm, programmers? Hackers? How about getting pirated versions of very well known windows disassemblers and dumpers? That would be very same, I even assume nvidia and amd do this to each other, nothing exceptional. But this will sure educate people interested in graphical hardware which later may join amd.

TO WRITE WINDOWS DRIVERS/SUPPORT.

By buying AMD card - you are paying windows crew in windows driver. Each card you buy - more you support it. There is zero difference, if you don't buy it. Unless you are learning gfx hardware developer... no, not on linux, not necessary.

A lot of normal non-technical people (huge amount) with money are interested in linux and want benefits of opensource. Forget that.

You need to subconsciously preinstall OS on all boxes and put labels everywhere, ban developers not behaving to the policy to achieve "behave or die" state - and you make it "popular".

You need to start a cheap (as in essence) zen-clone cult with white, rounded corners, cultists wearing blue jeans. And you make that OS somehow popular too.

But what about people with brains. People that want their money to be put where they want change. To push, instead of being pulled. To receive what they expect for money, where money does make sense? Are they all technical gfx hardware developers?

Right now, the message that I hear is "License our crappy corrupted piece of junk for extra high price at no reason" or an AMD offer - "Build your own car, all by yourself - with help of your buds+beer - AMD will provide you with bolts and 3K pages of documentation".
"What? You are not interested in receiving bolts and docs for free? You actually want to buy AMD hardware? Ok, do what you want, but know that your money will go into support of crappy corrupted piece of junk for extra high price, because we think... no, we are very sure you will want it... no, thats correct one - because you actually dont have neither choice, nor any of your money are are a driving force."

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It is hard to understand how they figure out Im using it (and bought it) only due to opensource driver and I want my money going in direction "opensource". But no such way, up to this moment, exists. I pay AMD, yes. They develop windows drivers. Not opensource. Where is my money going?

I'm certain they have estimates of their market share on linux, and how that compares to their overall market share. This is no different than any other company. At the moment they have 2 developers paid to work on the OSS drivers, maybe if they see enough demand that might go up to 3 or even 4.

In the end, this is a similar situation to voting. You can make a strong argument that any single vote won't ever matter, so why even bother voting. What really matters is if you can convince your friends and neighbors to vote the way you want, or other large numbers of people. Yet most people still consider their own vote important, even if the politician they're supporting won't ever know exactly why you voted that way or what particular action you want them to take. So if you want more OSS support, buy AMD and you just have to trust that in large enough numbers they will take notice and further support OSS.

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Please, please, Mr. Bridgeman, please give people the possibility to inform the HQ what code is parsed by your cards that they purchase. Please! Every card has a SN, this SN alone + small booklet or even mention on AMD/ATI website is absolutely enough! After purchasing hardware people will logon there and put their card in database, they only need a SN and driver type, nothing more. No one buys cards everyday, it would be so much helpful! And PPd compressed DB does not waste any hw resources past 30$ harddrive, nor it exposes private information.

What would we do with the information ? Let's say we get 645 people wanting open source Linux drivers, 2 wanting BeOS drivers, and one Windows user. Why would anyone believe that the results from a voluntary mechanism would be reflective of our entire customer base ? Why do you believe it ?

Right now, the message that I hear is "License our crappy corrupted piece of junk for extra high price at no reason" or an AMD offer - "Build your own car, all by yourself - with help of your buds+beer - AMD will provide you with bolts and 3K pages of documentation".

"What? You are not interested in receiving bolts and docs for free? You actually want to buy AMD hardware? Ok, do what you want, but know that your money will go into support of crappy corrupted piece of junk for extra high price, because we think... no, we are very sure you will want it... no, thats correct one - because you actually dont have neither choice, nor any of your money are are a driving force."

OK, I'm losing you here. You know we provide proprietary drivers for Linux so you're not being forced to use another OS (guessing that's what you mean), so I don't really know what you are trying to say here. I feel like I'm overdosing on analogy

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I wonder why RH does this. They are no way "fun" or "hobby", they are making money with opensource solutions driving opensource forward. If they need tesla in corporate there is so much research to be done on foreign(as in not manufactured by them) hardware, same as everything else.

Last time I installed Linux Mint on my GF parents PC it refused to boot due to KMS in NV driver, which I disabled for VESA and all went fine(including installing proprietary for 8300 IGP, which is more than enough to run almost all titles).

So why do they put money there, it wont be functional and it wont be complete. For fun?

Red Hat Xorg developers have answered this multiple times in this forum and elsewhere. Essentially Red Hat is primarily funding the development of GNOME Shell and wants Xorg drivers to be capable of supporting it out of the box. Not gaming level performance but reasonable speed and functionality.

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Seriously bridgman I am almost certain you would get at least 50-100 BeOS/Haiku users wanting drivers and thats a low estimate. There is currently $2000 bucks sitting in the bounties for someone to implement a gallium driver on Haiku. Where someone to make a serious effort I would imagine Haiku Inc would also step up to the plate and help out with some funding.

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Right now, the message that I hear is "License our crappy corrupted piece of junk for extra high price at no reason" or an AMD offer - "Build your own car, all by yourself - with help of your buds+beer - AMD will provide you with bolts and 3K pages of documentation".

The car example is not 100% accurate, you have to see first all people in the world (with a computer and some spare time), can together work on the ONE car, if they get done one car or make it sligtly better, you can copy that car. ^^ Thats a huge difference, if BMW or enother car company would offer all people on the world they could build one car and then they would copy it for all people on the world, believe me there would be build the best car ever in a hurry.
So thats also the point, AMD cant support 500 different oses, but they can release the information to build a driver for all this groups who want drivers for their os and give some examples for them to build the 500 different drivers. Thats the right way.

Thats also the difference why opensource is that successful, you cant make as one company superp things. you can maybe conzentrate on one thing or two but not on 1000 and make good things there too. And even Nvidia cannot make a very good driver for linux. Face it its clearly better than the AMD-Blob, but its far from perfect. And why do they even come close to a really good driver, because they overwrite half of the Linux + xserver and make sure they have control other all the (own) dependencies. So in a free softwareworld, where api changes can happen 100 in a day in theorie on different locations a company cannot found to track this api changes in no time and fix all this with hours or minutes difference. Its importent that anybody in theorie and prakticaly much people can make the changes to get it back running. Else you have the situation we have on the binary blobs, where you have to bag that they get it back running, and this is not exclusive for the amd blob, nvidia suffered also very long of some api-changes.

The one who uses the hardware are the one who are really motivated to get it running or keep it running or..., the ones who sold you the hardware, have only a vague hope that you buy the next card also by them, and also then if it works today or in a week is not that importent for them, but maybe for you

k got it to long maybe but the car point was the importent one

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I'm certain they have estimates of their market share on linux, and how that compares to their overall market share. This is no different than any other company. At the moment they have 2 developers paid to work on the OSS drivers, maybe if they see enough demand that might go up to 3 or even 4.

In the end, this is a similar situation to voting. You can make a strong argument that any single vote won't ever matter, so why even bother voting. What really matters is if you can convince your friends and neighbors to vote the way you want, or other large numbers of people. Yet most people still consider their own vote important, even if the politician they're supporting won't ever know exactly why you voted that way or what particular action you want them to take. So if you want more OSS support, buy AMD and you just have to trust that in large enough numbers they will take notice and further support OSS.

Lets stay aside from voting no? Because it does not work. Not the voters have the power, but those who count them. And only hope to remove this is to make voting and counting absolutely transparent. You also have to make politics absolutely and completely transparent. This is non-existant in the world. In no country. You either have:
1) Dictator A
2) Dictator B
or
1) Dictator A
2) Son of Dictator A
or
1) Marionette A for group A
2) Marionette B for group A
Go, vote!

What we have here though are magicians, prophets.
You buy the 500$ card and hold it in your bag.
You come to them and they say - you didn't buy it.
You show them the card and they respond you - here take this books and bolts - make it to work yourself.
You ask them why don't they stand behind their card, why can't they help, not separate, but add community; and they respond - from our forcasts -you should be a minority.
You say, but I pay money for hardware; how am I different from the windows user, or mac user, who also prefer their os and want support of company to use software on their platform. And they respond - we don't need you, but we will gladly take your money and hand over the bolts.

I buy amd card, I dont buy amd card - where is the difference? Nowhere. I do not get what I expect from the card. Instead you must yourself join the hobby crowd on reinventing the wheel. You should spend your time or money to people completely unrelated to the card itself. So what do you get, if you purchase AMD card? Tin can. What will you motivate? You money will be lost.

Say, do you actually own AMD card? Did you spend your money for opensource high-quality support from them?

The situation is similar with AIO printer from Kodak. "Yes, we support linux!" It turned out haha, you can only use the printer standalone. This means you have to save on SD card and print standalone; you can scan on SD card and load it in the machine. This is not support, this is absence of it. Now look here: https://register. hp .com

They do not really profit from registering. They do not really profit from linux userbase. They don't really profit from your case.

What would we do with the information ? Let's say we get 645 people wanting open source Linux drivers, 2 wanting BeOS drivers, and one Windows user. Why would anyone believe that the results from a voluntary mechanism would be reflective of our entire customer base ? Why do you believe it ?

No, not wanting. Purchased AND demanding opensource. This is vital.
Ok, let us assume we have 645 linux people.
From SN we get the type of card they used and calculate mean price of EACH unit; Based on unit type, we subdivide the sold amount in groups and assign them to to-do lists for each specific segment - so we get weighted picture.

For each card in each group we can extract the costs spend on driver team.
Now we calculate the price matrix and have specific amount of money for each task. From that money, we can assign developers and publish the monthly statistics.
We might and also should promote future development possiblities, amount of money required and let people vote by buying the actual cards.

I don't follow this. Are you saying that only the HW vendor can work on open source drivers ?

Say, AMD has driving power of 500.
Proprietary is "belonging to you" and thus having driving power of 500.
Opensource is belonging to you and everyone else, without them able to make it proprietary. A driving power of 500 + Npeople x 0.01
This only reflects the development power. But there are other things such as additional development for example on outdated cards - possiblity for such work to be done out of the house from people funding a developer - and it will be included back into the stack.

OK, I'm losing you here. You know we provide proprietary drivers for Linux so you're not being forced to use another OS (guessing that's what you mean), so I don't really know what you are trying to say here. I feel like I'm overdosing on analogy

AMD can push closed source driver to match nvidia features, leaving several years behind for same situation in the end - ie no advantage, but alternative. Also, mind you, that in proprietary AMD has by far less product coverage scope than nvidia, and also less version range of fundamental software - which both must be boosted to match nvidia.

Or it can stand behind opensource to gain advantage already in progress of making it.
For this case, AMD should not consider opensource as hobby, but stand behind it. Monetary. It should find finacial possiblities (within its sales) and bind them to official opensource support team.

Right now linux games and 3D software, which are normal cases for buying discrete cards, are used on nvidia.

Everywhere I read linux fail to become desktop operating system the reasons are lack of software and hardware support. The lack of software is due to inefficient performance and short user base. The lack of hardware is due to inefficient user base. A absolutely normal "devils circle", which is already broken by nvidia in terms that they provide hardware support, allowing more software to appear, which will attract userbase puchasing nvidia hardware and software solutions.

So the only reason why AMD may not invest in linux is in AMD itself.

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The car example is not 100% accurate, you have to see first all people in the world (with a computer and some spare time), can together work on the ONE car, if they get done one car or make it sligtly better, you can copy that car. ^^ Thats a huge difference, if BMW or enother car company would offer all people on the world they could build one car and then they would copy it for all people on the world, believe me there would be build the best car ever in a hurry.

Thanks for the answer, but I think the example is pretty accurate even if it is about cars.
Lets take BMW. Lets take they make it opensource - providing documentation. Even if they own patents and copyrights to the car itself, they produce clean result where anyone can exchange unneeded parts, be sure whats under the hood, improve, suggest ideas etc.

You see Im not talking about making own car AT ALL? You can. If you wish. But if you are not hardware expert and work as barber, you put money there and have it. Still if you dont want something, you pay or ask friend who is programmer and he removes. For all barbers as yourself(in this example).

Not one car. Many cars. Stock, modified, from scratch. Depends on your wish. With company happy to give you what you want for your money.

Crackers will crack further - opensource or not there would be no change. It is unrelated. They are good financed by each of the parties themself. Friends, eh?)

So thats also the point, AMD cant support 500 different oses, but they can release the information to build a driver for all this groups who want drivers for their os and give some examples for them to build the 500 different drivers. Thats the right way.

Linux is not 500 oses. It is one os with open specs. If BSD people want and have manpower they too, can port it to BSD. If they pay money to AMD and achieve specific amount, AMD will do this job for them. But AMD should start counting, market - aware, not blind. This is not different from clones, respins, etc. People want - people pay, time or money. The thing is I pay for AMD hardware and get nothing to use it efficiently. Except it works efficiently in Windows(tada!).

Thats also the difference why opensource is that successful, you cant make as one company superp things. you can maybe conzentrate on one thing or two but not on 1000 and make good things there too. And even Nvidia cannot make a very good driver for linux. Face it its clearly better than the AMD-Blob, but its far from perfect. And why do they even come close to a really good driver, because they overwrite half of the Linux + xserver and make sure they have control other all the (own) dependencies. So in a free softwareworld, where api changes can happen 100 in a day in theorie on different locations a company cannot found to track this api changes in no time and fix all this with hours or minutes difference. Its importent that anybody in theorie and prakticaly much people can make the changes to get it back running. Else you have the situation we have on the binary blobs, where you have to bag that they get it back running, and this is not exclusive for the amd blob, nvidia suffered also very long of some api-changes.

The one who uses the hardware are the one who are really motivated to get it running or keep it running or..., the ones who sold you the hardware, have only a vague hope that you buy the next card also by them, and also then if it works today or in a week is not that importent for them, but maybe for you

k got it to long maybe but the car point was the importent one

I think opensource is not only successful due to effort distribution, but also because of "pay and get what you pay for" due to open model. Not more, not less, but exactly. And the effort is not wasted.

You pay yourself. Or you may pay combined. With skills, money, etc - with input. In direction that is vital for YOU.

If breakage happens somewhere - it will be tracked and handled by those who are interested. If you were not breaking it yourself, it won't break.

We are not assembling 500 automobiles and asking manufacturer to support it. We may assemble anything that we see fit, by providing our own efforts if we see it fit. And the manufacturer is only asked to make his hardware work as it is advertised.